


The Most Important Meal of the Day

by Lady_Ganesh



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Breakfast, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 18:39:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1357804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Ganesh/pseuds/Lady_Ganesh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If anyone had told Steve he'd be eating breakfast with Tony Stark the morning after aliens invaded, he would've told them they were crazy.</p>
<p>Turns out, though, Tony makes pretty good bacon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Most Important Meal of the Day

**Author's Note:**

> This was written a while back for...well, for something, and CaptainBlue betated. Remaining mistakes are mine.

Tony had started talking about staying together before they'd even finished their shawarma. Everyone was exhausted, and they'd get debriefed by SHIELD in the morning anyway, and wouldn't it be easier if everyone just hung out in the tower for a while? Probably safer too....

Steve had only been half paying attention -- Clint was explaining how his tracer arrows worked -- but it sunk in eventually. He'd been looking forward to his little apartment, and was ready to object when Natasha touched his arm. He was never great at reading women, but her face was clear as a billboard. "Yeah," he said. "Makes sense."

Walking back to the tower with the others (Loki had been bound by then, and Thor was dragging him like a dog on a leash), Steve realized why Natasha had signaled him. Tony should have been more exhausted than anyone else, but he scanned the sky constantly, as restless as if the fight hadn't even happened. Steve had seen it before in the field; it was hard to shut down after combat, harder still when you worried about your comrades. It took practice to learn to let go, and Tony still hadn't had enough. ( _We're not soldiers,_ wasn't that what he had said?) The only time he even approached calm was during a phone conversation with someone Natasha quietly identified as Pepper.

"Is Pepper a girl?" he whispered.

Tony overheard anyway. "She's the most beautiful woman in the world," he said, pressing a button on his phone and flashing a grin at Steve. "You'll see."

"I guess I will," Steve said, and wondered what Tony thought beautiful meant.

 

The tower was still smoking when they got back, a sort of gentle, unassuming smoke that probably meant the ugly thing wasn't going to burn down. They stood for a moment, just looking at it, taking it in. Steve felt very tired.

"You got any place for us to sleep?" he tossed over at Tony, not out of any real objection, more to give himself -- maybe all of them -- some sense of normalcy.

Tony took the bait. "Lucky for you, Cap --" he pointed at Steve for emphasis -- "emergency equipment stays in the basement. Stark Tower was built to feed and shelter two hundred employees for up to six days in a disaster." Tony gestured at the chaos. "Pretty sure this qualifies, and even you guys can't eat enough for two hundred people."

"What about the people already there?"

Tony shook his head. "Hadn't really opened the place for business. It'll be perfect."

_Perfect_ wasn't the word Steve would have chosen, but _acceptable_ would do; Steve had certainly slept in worse than a converted conference room, and there was enough space that he could have a room to himself. The cot was a step up from his military days, too, sturdier but lighter to move around. Steve made a mental note to ask Tony about the materials. Two days ago, he wouldn't have thought Tony Stark was the kind of guy who would work to make his people comfortable in any circumstance; now he was ready to get tips from the guy. Funny how that worked, sometimes. It hadn't just been Tony’s split-second decision to fly a nuclear bomb into another universe, either. Though that had helped.

He left the conference room to find a bathroom and ran into Natasha. "You gonna be okay by yourself?" she asked. "Clint and I are sharing, if you--"

"I'll be fine," he said. "Thank you."

She grinned at him. "Just knock across the hall if you need anything, I'm pretty used to the way Stark organizes things."

"I think I'll be gone once I hit the pillow."

 

His prediction proved true. When he woke, a voice in the conference room identified himself as Jarvis, and told him breakfast was ready on the fourth floor. It wasn't even the third strangest thing that had happened in the past few days, so he thanked the voice and asked directions to the stairs.

"The elevators are restored to service, Captain Rogers."

"Stairs, please." He was still tired from last night, but he needed to keep moving. Being a supersoldier didn't spare you from stiff joints.

Jarvis' directions were excellent. "You still there?" Steve asked to the walls as he climbed to the fourth floor. He wondered, for a moment, if anyone would answer.

"I am."

"Tony said there wasn't anyone working in the building yet, so...what are you? I mean, if you don't mind me asking."

"I am an artificial form of intelligence, Captain. I operate most functions in the tower, Mr. Stark's home, and in his armor."

"That's good to know," Steve said, and then realized the possibilities inherent in that level of control. "You take bribes? Incentives?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Also good to know," Steve said, pushing the stairwell door open. His stomach was in a weird place -- he was hungry, but the thought of food seemed overwhelming. 

He could smell the food as he went down the hall; frying bacon, eggs, something sweet he didn't recognize. He followed the smell and found Tony Stark in a huge, cafeteria-sized kitchen, frying up bacon to add to the pile already on a plastic plate on the counter. "Cap," Tony said, nodding. "You're the first up."

"You're up," Steve observed.

"Not sure I actually slept," Tony said. "Napped, I guess. Cat napped. Pepper came back about, I don't know, four? And then I couldn't sleep, because I was talking to her..." He shrugged. "I'll sleep later. Bacon? Sticky buns are still in the oven, and I've got to cook more eggs...."

There was another lesson Tony Stark hadn't learned yet; that you needed to grab sleep whenever you could take it. Or maybe he had learned it and just hadn't got the hang of it. 

Tony did have one thing down, though. You had to take care of your people. Steve remembered Tony offering him dried blueberries from a bag. He'd thought it was a ploy at the time.

He'd gotten a lot of things wrong about Tony Stark. He was ready to see what else he’d been wrong about.

The plate of bacon looked greasy. It smelled delicious.

"I'm starving," he said, and sat down at the table.


End file.
